Opening and Closing the Jury Room Door: A Sociohistorical Consideration of the 1955 Chicago Jury Project Scandal

Abstract

In 1954 social scientists and legal scholars from the University of Chicago Law School's Jury Project recorded six jury deliberations in Wichita, Kansas. Over a year later, news of the recordings erupted into a national scandal, and the researchers were subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. This article examines how the recordings came to be viewed as a violation of the tradition of trial by jury and a “stepping stone to wrecking the entire system of justice.” I begin by reviewing letters exchanged among the researchers, which illustrate how they easily arranged the jury recordings with the help of both judges and lawyers. I then analyze arguments against the jury recordings expressed in more than 100 newspaper editorials about the incident. Vehement criticisms of the jury recordings indicate that secret deliberations are viewed as both practical and symbolic underpinnings of the tradition of trial by jury. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this case for more recent revelations of jury room discussions.